Beyond the SEZ benefits, the scale of development creates its own gravitational pull. Unlike small developments that must attract employers one by one, a city-scale project with committed infrastructure investment, a large prospective workforce, and purpose-built commercial facilities presents a fundamentally different proposition. The combination of tax advantages, purpose-built facilities, access to an eager workforce living in affordable housing, and the ability to expand physical operations fast, creates an unmatched business case.
This is always the tricky part. The SEZ (special economic zone) and CLT (community land trust) combination, creates compelling incentives for both sides simultaneously. Residents get housing at 60% below market rates - an unprecedented opportunity in the current market. Employers receive exceptional business benefits through the SEZ framework. This dual-incentive structure ensures balanced growth rather than empty commercial or residential developments. We're not hoping for organic growth by selling at market rates; we're engineering subsidies by lifting bureaucracy building at scale and lowering taxes, thereby creating aligned economic incentives.
The economics work because of our unique SEZ/CLT (Special Economic Zone/Community Land Trust) combination and the scale of development. At city scale, the value uplift from commercial acreage is exponentially larger than in smaller developments. This commercial value can cross-subsidize residential prices in ways impossible for traditional town developments. Additionally, greenfield development eliminates the expensive land acquisition costs that plague town extensions, where compulsory purchase of existing developed land drives up costs significantly.
Town extensions face significant challenges: planning battles with existing residents, expensive land acquisition even with compulsory purchase powers, difficulty achieving good placemaking within existing constraints, and lengthy build processes. Most critically, they rarely improve productivity metrics and struggle to create affordable housing due to high land costs. The new city approach solves these issues systematically.
New towns offer some advantages like better placemaking potential and faster greenfield construction. However, they face critical limitations: they must be located next to existing infrastructure to be viable, they have minimal commercial centers requiring profitability through much higher residential prices, and they're unlikely to change regional productivity metrics. They remain dependent on other areas for employment rather than creating self-sustaining economic ecosystems. And yet politically speaking, they are often as difficult to create as new cities.
The risk profile actually improves at scale. Small developments fail if they can't attract enough residents or employers quickly. City-scale development creates momentum through critical mass - the infrastructure investments, anchor tenants, and initial residential phases create irreversible momentum that de-risks subsequent phases. The bigger risk is thinking too small and creating another failed new town rather than a transformative new city.
After more than 15 years of stagnation, per capita GDP growth is paramount. Data from the Resolution Foundation shows that our last new city, Milton Keynes is far more productive than anywhere else in the UK except London. Conversely, adding homes to existing lower productivity places might be far less cost-effective because: 1. The infrastructure to make those places more productive (mass transit, better road networks, phone masts, sewerage, cheaper energy) is rarely guaranteed to be built alongside housing. 2. When it is built, it's painfully slow and expensive because people already live there and have huge veto powers. 3. You can't capture the land uplift value to pay people off. Given the crisis we're in, pitting efficient, at-scale greenfield build-out that pays for itself against expensive retrofitting via town extensions makes little sense.
We've got plenty of smart people in the UK and families who are already well rooted in towns and cities are less likely to move. What this new city does is to agglomerate talent in one place and unlock huge amounts of productivity and disposable income for those residents so they can spend, be more entrepreneurial and not have to worry about being forced to move.
They should copy our model by buying farmland land and building! Reforming a 70 year policy (the Greenbelt) is probably the best start. We want a race to the top not the bottom.
There simply isn't enough brownfield land to do something like this at this scale. Also the CLT model only works when there's enough real land uplift to lock in for future generations.
An excellent one we hope! Before we nationalised planning in 1947, developers would be compensated by local authorities if their plans were refused. We reversed that in a climate where it was expected that local authorities would do all the building. Otherwise some of our greatest projects, The Olympics, the Channel Tunnel, Canary Wharf, and Milton Keynes, have used primary legislation and development corporations to push through major building projects of national importance.
This is a vital question but providing huge numbers of jobs, and massively upgraded road and rail links, should be where we start.
CLT models don't work with regeneration. They only work when the land is very cheap to buy in the first place. However we think the Forest City model will work anywhere there is a demand from both business and prospective residents to unlock growth at scale.
In order to best align interests, ACDC is a profit making company. Like Canary Wharf and other big scale developments, we will seek out an option on commercial land as a reward for risking tens of millions in development capital by designing, planning, and proving the business case for Forest City 1.
England has massively underbuilt on its land compared to every other European nation. We're in a housing crisis where even the richest 10% of Londoners can't afford a home. The affordability crisis is bad in every major English conurbation. We need new cities. But we can also build with gentle density, in a way that creates new places and communities, not just boxy homes on the edge of towns.
No. But that's why we're exploring modular/factory pre built building methods which, at scale, can reduce the need for skilled labour.
We've been advised by one of the leading UK experts that it is. But that doesn't mean there won't be very substantial issues to overcome. The expertise, quality and raw materials exist in Europe.
We will need to build hundreds of primary schools, scores of secondary schools, hospitals and vital community services. This is one of the great benefits of building an entire city as opposed to a small town extension or just some extra homes on the edge of a village - the Section 106 agreements are more than effectively baked in.
We haven't built a reservoir in this country for 30 years. Building a city will also give us the land, space and permission to build new water infrastructure and also build a much smarter sewerage system.
Taxes can be easily changed by democratic mandate. We want this set up to last for longer than a five year cycle.
We want to reform the social contract around housing. Where you live, work and raise children, should not be an asset for speculators to drive financial gains. It's been at the root of many of our economic woes. The CLT model will change that for everyone living in the city.
Yes. There's no two ways around this. Only ~1 million people can live in the city. But building good things for some people is not a reason to build nothing for anyone. We have to start somewhere. If this model works, we want to roll it out across the country.
Yes. But our current system is far, far, worse. We discriminate on the basis of who your parents are - very rich so they can give you a deposit, or very poor, so they can hand off a social home.
If there is a waiting list, the City's Community Land Trust will pay them for the current price of the home (not the land underneath it).
We are working with the Community Land Trust Network to ensure our legal and financing structures will be very robust.
This will be funded in very large part, via private finance. But this is only feasible if the government passes legislation for a development corporation who can build without traditional planning constraints.
We need to build not just all the amenities that a city needs, but also a lot of infrastructure that East Anglia can benefit from including energy, road and rail. Long leasing thousands of acres of commercial land for development and rent will raise tens of billions.
They won't be. At least not directly with cash. We do believe that any new endeavour like this, which no other European or North American country has attempted in 50 years, needs to be given a chance to succeed by lowering the risks to entry. Balancing what ordinary people get and commerce also receives is vitally important to making the whole project work for the benefit of the country as a whole.
We're planning that 30% of homes will be available to rent as part of a rental cooperative.
Yes. Stratford City proves we can do this. That development showed we can create pedestrianized, human-scale environments where children can run free because the world was designed with them in mind—safe, walkable neighborhoods built to exceptional standards. If we could do that for the Olympics, we can do this for the nation. For the sake of the next generation, we have no choice but to continue believing we can still do remarkable things.
Much of the land we're looking to build on is monocultural farmland. Monocultures are actually one of the worst environments for biodiversity. We'd be replacing a substantial proportion of it with either parks, gardens and a 12,000 acres which are much better habitats for replenishing nature than monocultures.
We'll work with anyone as long as the basic principles of the city are adhered to - its scale, general location, ability to build at speed, the Community Land Trust and the Special Economic Zone provisions.
Labour has said they already want to do this and we support that but we don't want take a wait and see approach. Also de-nationalising planning laws is not on the table so building a city, as opposed to much smaller scale developments, would always need the support of Parliament. This isn't just about more homes, it's about a new socio-economic contract.
After a period of time, the development corporation will eventually hand planning control to what we envisage will be a new local authority.
Greenfield development at city scale allows us to design integrated transport from the ground up. Unlike town extensions where retrofitting trams and transit is complex and expensive, we can build these systems as part of the initial infrastructure, making them more cost-effective and better integrated with the overall urban design.
This is always a risk, but this particular government seems determined to drive through infrastructure delivery. We envisage that the dedicated link to Cambridge will be undertaken by the development corporation itself.
Cities operate on quite different economic principles than new towns. Towns are primarily about commuting to and from other locations, making proximity to existing employers and transport crucial. Cities, however, create intra-area employment and activity hubs. They're about pulling people in from surrounding regions rather than sending residents elsewhere. Given the substantial current and latent regional activity in East Anglia and London, the new city would function as a regional hub with its own transport spokes, not just another commuter town dependent on existing links. Secondly the infrastructure economics fundamentally change at city scale. A city of 1 million people creates an overwhelming business case for dedicated rail and motorway connections - the per capita infrastructure costs decline massively compared to smaller developments. While a town of 30-70k might never justify dedicated road and rail links, a city-scale development makes these investments economically viable. We're designing at a scale where the infrastructure investment makes clear financial sense.
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